


but thinking makes it so

by 75hearts



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, POV Second Person, it's just like. one sentence.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-29 16:20:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12634713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/75hearts/pseuds/75hearts
Summary: You listen to the story just as everyone else does. You know the people in it--you yourself are in it--but you know one other thing: This is not your story.





	but thinking makes it so

This is your story: you are young and idealistic. Almost the youngest on the ship--Magnus claims he’s older than you, but you and the other five agree that he’s almost certainly lying about his birthday, because his face says he’s twenty at most. He’s a fighter, though, and his hugs are as strong and frequent as his punches, and he laughs with strangers. You are a shrinking violet of a writer, quiet and unsure.

You have too many journals. Or not enough. You go between the two. You have a lot of journals, almost a full room’s worth, telling the stories of worlds and worlds and worlds. Each world had entire libraries worth of stories, and now they have this: almost a room combined. Millions of stories eaten out of existence--there aren’t enough journals to replace that. Still, it’s a lot of journals for a small ship. Twice as much as you technically need, Davenport reminds you incessantly; every journal has its identical twin, just in case. So even if something happens to some of the journals, the stories won’t be destroyed forever. You write both copies at once, both hands moving in sync.

This goes on for years, and then--

You are running. Your friends are gone, and you are alone, and you are still running. You have to. You are the only one who can. You keep writing your journals. You stop trusting safety. Your friends will not save you. The ground beneath your feet will not catch you. You run, and the world is not safe, nowhere is safe, so you run and the only thing you can trust to do anything is yourself. The only thing you can ever trust to do anything is yourself, because your friends need to be saved and so does the world and nobody can or will do anything about it except for you.

Eventually, you all stop running. You stop, just for a moment, and try to rest. You come up with a plan, and Lup and Barry come up with a plan. You beg, but everyone chooses their plan over yours. Their plan works; the hunger does not come. But it destroys the world below. There is war, constant, unceasing; they take your plan and they turn it into destruction, time and time again, entire families and towns and cities leveled in days because of what you did. For a year, you do nothing but stand by and watch the world beneath you crumble, and know: this is your fault. This time, it was not John that killed these people, it was not The Hunger, it was their own hunger for what you put out into this world. It was you. You and your friends, trying to save the world, killed these people.

A year passes while you watch the world slowly implode. And then Lup disappears.

 

\--

 

Another year passes. You work incessantly, writing and writing and writing. You don’t leave your room, don’t eat. They worry about you. They whisper, not sure what you’re doing. You don’t care. They don’t need to. All you know is that people are dying because of you, and you have to stop it. And then you have to save the world.

One day, you get rid of half of your journals. You carry one, then the next, making a pile by Fisher. Fisher glows, gently, and you hold your breath. This will be worth it. I’m going to fix this. I have to.

You try to get Magnus to sit down so he doesn’t fall over. You try to push Magnus’s confused face, pain written in every line, out of your mind. You fail. But it’s already over. It’s done. So you take them all down, try to find them each a home. Davenport stays by your side, so intently broken. You tell yourself this was necessary. You plan.

You do not save the world.

 

\--

 

You tell yourself you had to do this. You have no other choice. You make yourself believe it because you do not think you could live with yourself if you admitted that it’s a lie. One year passes, and then another. Again and again, the people you send fall. You try to do it yourself and lose twenty years of your life and your left hand and you are not young and idealistic anymore, you are old and sad and cynical and clinging with all your life onto that one strand of hope. You wake up every morning, and you tell yourself you’re going to save the world, and another town dies, another friend falls. You made everyone else forget, and you yourself cannot forget. You do not sleep enough anymore to have nightmares. Instead, you work.

By your side is your oldest friend, your old mentor and captain, and you have destroyed him so completely, and you tell yourself: I have to keep going. This can’t be for nothing. I have to save the world.

You watch the sunrise every morning from the moon, and you do not admit failure.

 

\--

 

You get some hope when the baby is born, a tiny replica of Fisher, singing, bell flashing in beautiful blues and greens. When you take him away, Fisher screams for a week, a horrific, mournful sound that nobody has heard before. You do not let it hurt you.

You reach back down to the world and bring back your friends. You introduce yourself to these people who you have known for over a century, and they do not recognize you. Taako calls himself an idiot. He is a prodigy, he is one of the three best wizards in the multiverse, he is clever and impossible to fool and taught himself animal languages and his own form of calculus. You call him on it, because he is brilliant. He was always so confident, even cocky, self-assured.

And then Magnus, kind Magnus who yells compliments at everyone, Magnus who does not recognize you anymore, says, “No, he’s not. It’s pretty accurate,” and your heart twists in a way you didn’t realize it still could. And then Taako tells you how he took his staff off of a dead wizard in a red robe, and he doesn't realize he is describing the corpse of his twin sister, but you do, and it takes every last bit of your willpower not to respond, not to do anything. Taako, who you had set up the perfect life for, who is now laughing and joking, whose smile has turned cruel and whose eyes have become dim, who does not even know he has a sister. This is what he has become, you realize, because of what you did. Is this because of what happened twelve years ago, or is this because of what has happened in those twelve years when you didn’t--couldn’t--see them? Either way, your friends are in front of you and they do not recognize you and you don’t know if you recognize them either, and it is your fault. You tell yourself that you did what you needed to do, that saving the world isn’t easy, doesn’t come without sacrifice. You learned that in Wonderland: you do not get what you want unless you are willing to make the sacrifice. You failed, in there, you sacrificed so much and still failed because it wasn’t enough, and you are not going to make that mistake again.

You tell them that they can help you save the world. You tell yourself that, too. You do not tell them anything else, no matter how much you ache to.

They do help you, as best as they can. They bring you one relic, and then another, and then another. Slowly, the destruction that you rained down on this world comes to a stop. Obsidian circles no longer level cities. No more little girls turn their parents into peppermint. You are winning. You no longer look down at a world burning slowly.

You try not to get attached again. You get ready to save the world. You avoid looking at the one flash of red in the blue-and-white sea of your closet. You try not to think of the way they have all changed. You try not to cry thinking about Lup’s skeleton in the cave, still enveloped in a matching red, red robe.

(You fail.)

 

\--

 

The world is ending and you are going to stop it.

Barry is there, now, with Magnus and Merle and Taako. And Davenport, who has always been there but hasn’t really. They stare at you with varying levels of horror, fear, and anger. Around them, the sky is falling, tendrils of black opal reaching down. The white creatures of the hunger are fighting your friends. Everything is crashing down around you and you don’t have time for this but you also don’t have a choice.

“What have you done?” Davenport asks you, and it’s the first sentence he’s said in so many years, and his eyes are full of so much horror, so much disgust as he looks up at you. And there is fear there, too, fear that the young girl he mentored could have done this to him for so long.

Taako has his umbrella--Lup’s umbrella, really, he knows that now--and it is pointed at you. He’s crying. You realize then that you have never seen him cry before. His face is utterly blank, and somehow that is scarier than if he had been threatening you through screams and anger. You have never seen him like this. You have never seen any of them like this. You have never seen your friends as enemies.

Magnus is trying with all his might to keep every part of himself calm. His voice is carefully even, his hands do not shake, his sword is steady. But anger strains underneath the surface, as he tries to comfort Taako, as he points his sword directly at your heart.

Merle is semi-hysterical, still not understanding, not understanding any of it. He is not threatening you; in fact, he is the only one who does not seem angry or horrified or disgusted. It reminds you of your first year on this plane, of him dancing as the relics destroyed the world.

Barry is next to them all, with his blue jeans and a red robe. He looks, more than anything, tired. He has known for so many years; this is not a surprise to him like it is to the others. His urgency comes from the hunger all around, not from his own revelations, as he tries to convince you that you are going to destroy the world.

You do not listen. You ready your spell.

 

\--

 

The baby voidfish sings a song and tells the world a story. It is not your song. It is not your story.

The song almost disappeared alone and afraid because of you. The story almost ended early because of you.

The song is beautiful. The story is happy, even funny. It is hopeful. The voidfish is joyful.

You are none of these things, anymore. Your story is a tragedy. You are old. You are guilty. You are alone.

 

\--

 

You do not save the world. Your plan does not save the world. Everything you did, every sacrifice you made for your plan, every friend you destroyed from the inside out, was unneeded.

You help, but you do not save the world.

Instead, you apologize. You let yourself cry. Magnus comes over and hugs you, and you are so, so sorry. And he picks up Merle so Merle can hug you too, and Lup’s spectral form comes over and touches her forehead to yours and there are big, ugly, heaving sobs and your breath catches. You feel like you are breaking. Somewhere inside you, you remember being a twenty-something girl with big eyes and long hair and hope; you remember what it feels like to be young and idealistic and surrounded by friends who love you. You have been lonely for so, so long.

And Lup makes a dumb, insensitive joke, and you burst out laughing, and you hug her.

 

\--

 

You save the world together, all seven of you, and some other friends you made along the way. You are not the only one against the world anymore.

 

\--

 

Years pass. Everyone gets their happy ending, for the most part. The world does not end. Taako never forgives you. You do not dare to ask Davenport.

More years pass. You all come together to sit next to Magnus when he dies.


End file.
